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Going for Broken

The Beech-Nut factory closed in March, after more than 100 years in Canajoharie, N.Y.Credit
Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

We paddled canoe-style; I sat in the middle and Marie at the stern. The water was clean and cold and deserted. We circled an island. Dead branches washed up in piles along the banks, making intricate symmetrical reflections in the nearly still water. Nathaniel Hawthorne described a ride on the Erie Canal in 1835 as “so tiresome.” From our small, slow rowboat, I found it mesmerizing.

I regularly drive by the canal on the Interstate when I go east. The towns along it, partly decayed and yet still quite beautiful, have a transparent relationship to history: so much of the past is still visible in their ruins and remnants. There are abandoned red-brick factories and handsome stone churches; restored Greek Revival houses next to faded Masonic lodges. The lush green hills make the derelict structures all the more striking. Why does a boarded-up building make a place seem even emptier than if there were nothing there at all? The solitude of these once-thriving canal towns and their industrial ruins is like a living memory of American ambition — of the desire for progress and all that it promised. I was curious about what remained of the Erie Canal’s antique-but-emphatic interruptions of the landscape, what still works and why I found it all so moving.

To experience these towns from the water-level vantage of the canal, I enlisted my friend Marie Lorenz. Marie, an artist, built the simple lightweight rowboat we were using out of plywood and fiberglass epoxy as part of a continuing art project, “The Tide and Current Taxi” — in which she takes people for stealth rides on the forgotten waterways of New York City, altering their perception of both the city and the water. We, too, would use Marie’s boat to see something familiar in a new way — or, actually, the old way, though the authentic old way would have involved mules pulling us through the canal.

We launched from the Ilion Marina, about 10 miles east of Utica in Central New York. Ilion is dominated by the old Remington arms factory. Vintage postcards show it right on the canal, but now it is several blocks inland. Although we couldn’t tell that the canal used to run through downtown Ilion, it did. First built between 1817 and 1825, the canal changed twice, between 1835 and 1862 and then again between 1905 and 1918, when it joined, and canalized, parts of the Mohawk River to become the New York State Barge Canal.

Photo

The aqueduct ruins at Schoharie Crossing, near Fultonville, N.Y.Credit
Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

As the Erie Canal grew, it often overlapped and subsumed the previous canals; in some parts, though, it didn’t follow the old routes. You can find abandoned sections of the 1862 canal and even fragments of the original 1825 canal, if you look for them. In most of the towns, like Ilion, you would know the path the canal used to cut only by looking at a postcard or at street signs. When I discovered that the Erie Boulevards and Canal Streets and Water Streets I found all over Central New York were once canals, I felt as if I had learned a secret code, a way to imagine the past in the present.

We loaded the rowboat and paddled east with a helpful tailwind. We were the only people on the water, but we weren’t really alone because the canal runs right up against the railroad and the Interstate. We could barely see I-90, but we could hear its steady, low roar. The train tracks were much closer, and when a train came by — about every hour — it was like a technology timeline come to life: the railroads overtook the canal as a passenger route after the 1840s, and the Interstate overtook the canal as a commercial cargo route in the late 1950s. Now the canal has turned to recreational use, although it still carries small amounts of commercial cargo. It persists in a complex overlap of nostalgia and utility, obsolete but still operating.

We discovered firsthand how useful the machinery of the canal might actually be to a boater. Weeks of heavy rain had pushed rivers and lakes above flood level, delaying the canal’s opening for the season. The locks were closed. We would have to pull the boat ashore and drag it around them.

We quickly came to our first obstacle. The canal split in two: to the left was a dam and beyond it the Mohawk River rushing to a lower elevation; to the right, the canal with a closed guillotine-style steel guard gate, behind which lay calm water that led eventually to the lock. After the lock, the canal and the river formed one body of water again. Marie didn’t hesitate to climb the narrow steel walkway over the dam to take a look at the water on the river side. I stayed on the ground and used my iPad to check the river on Google Earth. There were many bends marked with angry white streaks. I showed it to Marie. She thought we could manage the river side and avoid both the gate and the lock.

Pulling the boat over the dam was difficult. We had to unload the duffels, carry them over the wall and down the steep and rocky embankment on the other side. Then we had to lift the boat — which really was quite light — over the wall. The water on the river side was altogether more complex and alive than that in the canal. Rocks created patches of white water, and any protrusions were covered in lattices of current-balanced branches from upstream. Marie pushed us off, and we avoided the rough water with ease, although we did have to duck as we cruised under a low-hanging tree. We rode the current to the join of the river and the canal, and I felt giddy with speed.

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The author(right) and Marie Lorenz, the boat's builder.Credit
Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

We stopped to investigate the lock we bypassed. Lock 18 was deserted but in glorious shipshape. A lock is a simple but ingenious device to allow a boat to pass between bodies of water at different levels: the doors at one end close, and the chamber fills with water (or drains) so the boat rises (or falls), then the doors open on the other side and the boat is released at the higher (or lower) level, like a water elevator. Each lock had a little building called a powerhouse. The one at Lock 18 dated from 1912 and was made of concrete. Painted white with blue trim, it looked like an elegant little house, with a low, hipped roof and long, vertical multipaned windows on each side. The powerhouses were once used to hold the engines that operated the locks. Lock 18 is now run from the grid, but we could see a vintage hydraulic engine through the windows of the powerhouse. Later, at Lock 15, we would see pristine gas engines, with polished brass pipes and old-fashioned wood-handled knife switches. We examined the lock’s gears and mechanisms and the huge water chamber made of concrete with riveted steel doors at each end. Unlike the decaying towns along the canal, the machinery was clean and freshly painted, and it gave off a distinct steampunk glamour.

We arrived in Little Falls just as the sun set. It began to rain, and we limped out of the boat. Little Falls is perched over waterfalls in a gorge between glacial rock faces. It has all the elements of a classic Erie Canal town, including many intact red-brick and stone factories. The hillside mansions overlooking the bridges, church spires and chimney stacks gave us a glimpse of how busy life along the canal once was. There were traces of former prosperity even in the long-empty buildings. We stayed by the water at the Inn at Stone Mill, a repurposed 19th-century textile factory, where in 1912 workers participated in a strike organized by the Industrial Workers of the World. An adjacent textile mill was now an antiques center. The exteriors of both buildings retained their rustic industrial character and magnificent stonework.

In the morning we had to figure out a way around the Little Falls lock, which was squeezed between a rock cliff and a rock island. We could hear the falls on the other side of the island. We climbed the island’s rough, ancient precipice, where we saw huge glacial potholes and a spectacular view of a long stretch of rapids. I was relieved when Marie decided that boating the falls side was impossible.

On the other side of the lock, we found our first set of canal ruins: an 1850 stone lock from the old Erie Canal, tucked under a highway overpass. The lock was made of dressed limestone blocks held together by cement. The water chamber, covered by grass, faded into the riverbank. When the new canal was finished in 1918, pieces of the old one were left and were slowly reclaimed by the landscape.

The following day, we again found traces of the old canal: a double lock built with two chambers so boats going in each direction could pass through at the same time. The stone chambers held water, stagnant little ponds covered in green clumps of algae. The huge limestone blocks were intact. I ran my hands along the elegant curves where the chambers used to open to the canal. Ferns grew out of the tight seams of the block walls. It was like an explorer’s expedition in reverse: we were discovering places after everyone had left them behind, the human imprint slowly fading.

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A disused canal lock near St. Johnsville, N.Y.Credit
Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

We made it past more locks. By now I trusted Marie, so we took the river side, and the faster current, whenever we could. We were trying to get to Canajoharie by noon, so that we could make it to some elaborate canal ruins at Schoharie Crossing later on. We were both gripped by the desire to make good time. We blamed this on our modern obsession with speed. We laughed, but we still couldn’t shake it.

Marie spotted an eagle, and we saw a small coyote loping along the water’s edge. Occasionally we would drift so we could take pictures. But mostly we remained focused on getting to the next place. I checked our progress on the G.P.S. We were taking much longer than I had hoped. We arrived at Canajoharie in the late afternoon.

Canajoharie has a pretty main street with restored historic storefronts and an impressive, modern museum building — the Arkell — attached to its old stone library. But part of Canajoharie’s distinction surely comes from its Beech-Nut factory. Although the factory is somewhat decrepit, its past optimism is unmistakable. Built in 1905, it is a large white building with multipane industrial windows and little frosting-like flowers painted on the cornice. It has ornate black metal entryways and a big red-lettered scaffold sign that shoots up over the factory and is visible from the canal. Beech-Nut had just moved operations out of town, and the building was closed down. I couldn’t help hoping that the old factory structure and sign would remain.

We decided to get back on the water. We needed to get going if we were going to make it to Schoharie Crossing by the next day, our last. We would find a place to camp on the way.

A headwind picked up, blowing west. We were barely moving. We inched past a little island. After much paddling and barely any progress, Marie suggested we go back to the island and wait until the wind died down. Eager to get to the ruins, I wanted to keep going. But Marie broke it to me that we wouldn’t make it to Schoharie Crossing. I looked at the map. She was right. There were no river-only side shoots. The indifferent canal was not going to get us there fast.

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The Erie Canal, alongside New York State Route 5S.Credit
Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

The island had a patch of trees and a sandy beach. We set up our tent and watched the water grow dark. The boats on the original canal used to have lanterns hanging at each end. One of the canal’s revolutionary qualities was that it could operate 24 hours a day. It must have felt miraculous to sit on deck at night and watch the lanterns and the reflection of the lights on the water as they glided past and then faded into the distance.

Our portion of the canal was illuminated only by moonlight and the distant lights of a Rodeway Inn. I could hear the trains whistle and approach and then pull away. I could hear all the cars on the thruway going so fast, so late, and there we were in the midst of it, sleeping on an island.

I woke up to a Canadian goose honking inches from my head, only the tent fabric between us. I had woken many times during the night when a train came through or a loud truck rattled by. As I lay there, I finally understood that we were not on a natural waterway in some remote, untouched setting. We were on a canalized river, sandwiched between a rail line and a thruway. The Erie Canal wasn’t built for leisure. It was meant to be the most efficient way to get to the next place. Our desire for progress, to make it to Schoharie Crossing, was appropriate. The canal’s formal uniformity pushed you forward. Its aesthetic charms were incidental, a side effect of engineering and water. It was full of natural beauty, but it was also an intervention, a piece of transformative technology. Part of what makes the canal compelling today is its ineluctable connection to its original purpose.

We began to look for a place where we could get out, hide the boat and head back to Ilion. But I-90 hugged the water very tightly, and there was no way across it. The same was true for the railroad tracks on the north side. I had driven this stretch of I-90 hundreds of times and never thought about how impenetrable it was. Unlike the canal, it had no relation to what it passed. We approached a lone lock. Surely there was a crossing point here. At the edge of I-90, we discovered a rickety pedestrian tunnel just wide enough for the boat. Halfway through the passage, we stopped to rest. The walls shook with the vibrations of the thruway just above our heads. Escaping the straight line of progress felt almost subversive. We emerged on the other side and called a taxi. We were back at our starting point in just under an hour; we had gone 40 miles.

A day later I drove to Schoharie Crossing. I took I-90, as I had so many times before. But now I kept looking over at the canal. How very odd it felt, particularly when I rode over the section with the secret tunnel running underneath it. With what seemed like amazing speed, I arrived at Schoharie Crossing, the only place where I saw a section of the original 1825 Erie Canal. I could also see large pieces of the three canals at once, but the 1842 aqueduct was the most eloquent ruin of them all. The aqueduct, which broke off about a third of the way across a creek, looked like a Roman ruin. Up close I could see the now-familiar limestone blocks. And as I stood at the base of the aqueduct, I turned away from the creek and saw the impression of the old canal prism — a kind of trough — run deep into the woods. It was hidden by 100 years of trees, bushes and grass, but once I looked for it, there the old canal was, its hard-built hollow clearly visible under the growth.

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2011, on Page MM44 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: GOING FOR BROKEN. Today's Paper|Subscribe